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Saturday, 20 June 2009 (si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te) 8:11am Heading to the gym, and the to a class/tour thingy about foraging for wild food in San Francisco, put on by the aptly named ForageSF. The First signed me up as a birthday present, and I'm quite looking forward to it. 7:57pm Wow. Lots of information from the foraging tour to digest (no pun intended). Evidently atriplex lentiformis, or salt bush, grows here in the Outer Lands. Had some today—the tour was around the Randall Museum, below Corona Heights, which I still find a little eerie thanks to Our Lady of Darkness. Just gotta figure out where they are in my neighborhood. I've also recently been given the go-ahead to start gardening the backyard, especially these next two months while my upstairs neighbors (and their dog!) are on vacation, so I'd best go ahead. | ||
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Friday, 19 June 2009 (breaking dawn) 5:21pm you know, it may not actually be possible to stop. 11:23pm I got to spend a fantastic twenty-three hours with her, minus a few spent that I spent in the morning at the gym with Raphaela. But it all adds up. | ||
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Thursday, 18 June 2009 (as a hidden fire) 3:51pm Ugh. Again with the waiting: according to the postal service's tracking system, the proposal is "waiting at the processing center and is ready for pickup," and it's been there since yesterday morning. It takes that long for a Priority Mail package to go from San Francisco to Berkeley? Evidently, it does. Back to the gym this morning, spent much of the day cleaning the apartment—funny how now that I'm making it an effort to keep it clean, actual maintenance is seriously time-consuming—and tonight is my birthday dinner with Marta. | ||
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Wednesday, 17 June 2009 (one promise that is given) 9:11am The show's come and gone, and the proposal is on its way to the editor. That means I can go back to the gym now. Haven't been since I worked with Raphaela Monday of last week, and it feels weird. I know my body hasn't decayed or anything in the meantime, and I've found various ways to exercise (often with Marta), but still, I don't like going so long without getting an hour of cardio in. Besides, I'm way behind on my reading. 11:20pm I saw Bunny this afternoon. I was sitting in front of the Muddy Waters at 24th and Valencia talking to a fellow who'd contacted me about possibly contributing to an art installation later this year (he'd somehow gotten the impression that I'm a visual artist, and was very gracious when I explained that I'm not) and she walked by. We talked for a few minutes and did the customary hello/goodbye hugs, but mostly I was thinking about how things turned out exactly the way they were supposed to. We were close friends for several months, kinda like dating in the most chaste way possible (Ennui and I, who never really clicked sexually and stopped trying fairly early on, were rabbits in comparision), I hoped it would evolve into something more but I was declined even a kiss on New Year's Eve. We drifted apart after that, today being the first time I've seen her since January. As we talked, I just kept thinking to myself that things worked out exactly the way they were supposed to. I wouldn't change any of it, because I'm very happy where I'm at right now. | ||
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Tuesday, 16 June 2009 (fifteen) 10:08am So this is thirty-six. Am I over the hill yet? When does that start? My only big plans today is to finish up the book proposal—which is coming along nicely—and get it in today's mail. Aside from the fact that it's been nearly a week since the editor requested it, I want it to have a June 16 postmark. For good luck and all. That's about it, really. There's a birthday lunch at Tartine's with my fellow six-sixteeners Isobel and Venice, but I don't believe I'll be making it, since finishing the proposal is my top priority. And Marta's otherwise engaged tonight, so she's taking me out for a birthday dinner on Thursday. I always like spreading out the birthday stuff anyway. 11:40am Nice. After being up for two weeks, "Blood on the Tracks" has received no comments, no Diggs, and has an average rating of two stars out of five, from a whopping nine votes. Hey, they can't all set the world on fire. 12:03pm Bloomsday and Captain Picard Day and my birthday are all fine and good, but June 16 truly rules because it's when the superflu is unleashed in Stephen King's The Stand. Can't beat the end of the world. 3:10pm The word "transgressive" isn't in Microsoft Word's dictionary. I'm not sure if that's transgressive of them, or just sloppy. 5:03pm Mission accomplished—the proposal is complete and Priority-Mailing its way to the editor. Now there's not much to do but wait. That, and continue submitting elsewhere. But not tonight. 6:50pm Heading to The Red Vic to see Watchmen with Rhiannon. sometime after midnight Having seen Watchmen in both IMAX and on the considerably smaller Red Vic screen, one thing is constant: Malin Akerman is badly miscast. It's probably not her fault, though, since the part is so poorly written. Afterward, we went to The Riptide, a bar which I've never been to in spite of it being half a mile from my house. Then again, I'm not that much of a bar person. It was nice to hang out with Rhiannon some more, and the Bloody Mary wasn't half bad, but I doubt I'll be going back by myself anytime soon. | ||
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Monday, 15 June 2009 (into the fire) 10:01am The birthday week begins. It's going to be a busy one. | ||
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Sunday, 14 June 2009 (i have to look up to see hell) sometime after midnight Excellent day with Marta. My upstairs neighbors were gone, along with their dog, affording the rare privilege of silence. We spent the night together, went to breakfast at the Sea Biscuit, walked out to the ocean, returned to the Black Light District and where she helped me edit the current draft of my book proposal (so far as I know, she's only person who's read Bottomfeeder from start to finish), then spent the remaining few hours leaving our mark on each other before heading to The Dark Room for Rhiannon and Sherilyn's Indiana Jones Trilogy Birthday Sleepover. After she survived what was probably the most intense introduction to Bad Movie Night imaginable (and Jonco was there for the first movie, too), I walked Marta back to her place afterward—it was well past one in the morning, and she lives within a few blocks of The Dark Room, as so many people I know do—and returned home, happy. Not quite as happy as I'd been if she'd come home with me, but that's okay. A little is enough, and I'm actually getting a lot more than little these days. Yay abundance! We'll be seeing each other again on Thursday, and much more after that. It's all good, and I can exhale now. | ||
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Saturday, 13 June 2009 (we're from america) 1:21pm I've lived in this apartment for fourteen years, and it's taken me this long to discover that occasionally opening the front door and the door to the entryway and my windows—all at the same time, mind you, important deal—promotes circulation and generally improves the air quality. Who knew? Tonight, Jonco and I are having dinner and going to see Spamalot. Then I going to pick up Marta and bring her back to my freshly aired-out apartment. sometime after midnight you know i'm falling for you, right? | ||
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Friday, 12 June 2009 (unkillable monster) sometime after midnight My brother Jonco's in town. Various plans had been floated around for tonight, mostly involving me and him and his wife going to the Hot Boxxx Girls show at Aunt Charlie's Lounge (with Marta possibly coming along), but it wound up being just me and him going to see Star Trek at The Metreon. And that's not bad at all. | ||
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Thursday, 11 June 2009 (wight spider) 9:23am I've said it before, I'll surely say it again, and it remains true (if crude): the nighttime has its charms, but morning nookie is the best. 4:17pm Nailed it last night. Great show overall, full house (only a few of whom were there specifically to see me, including Rhiannon and Marta), and my performance went off without a hitch. There were times during rehearsal when I would struggle for lines, or even just to remember the first few sentences of the next paragraph, but as always when I'm was actually on stage in the spotlight, it's all right there in my brain where I need it to be. Indeed, the only thing that went wrong was unexpected sweatiness. I didn't think it was all that hot, really, and I don't generally get flop-sweat, but at one point the sweat not only trickled down into my eyes, but carried some of my eyeshadow with it. The result was a stinging which I could not ignore, since it was making my eye involuntarily twitch and blink. And, of course, it had to be the eye which was facing more toward the audience, because that's how the universe works. I dealt with it well enough, and got a (sympathetic) laugh out of the audience. They enjoyed that more than the gratuitous Letterman reference I'd thrown into the piece, anyway. Oh well. They can't all be zingers. On the plus side, and there's ultimately far more on the plus side than the minus side, I got to use Angelo Badalamenti's "Moving Through Time" from Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me for the opening music. We never really had a chance to rehearse to it, but once the song started, I knew what I needed to do. Afterward, Marta and I went to the Go Go Cafe for a celebratory late-night Chinese meal, then back to the Black Light District. We probably stayed up longer than we should have, because that's how we are around each other. We finally went to bed around two, and I slept better than I did when she stayed over on Saturday night. It had been the first time someone else has slept in my bed in a year and a half, and there was a bit of a learning curve involved, since I've become set in my ways in the meantime. No white noise generator, no Buddha Machine, no jammies, not even the heater. The human body, even one as perfectly slim as Marta's, generates nearly one hundred degrees of heat on the Fahrenheit scale, and when in contact with another body it transfers some of the heat, often elminating the need for external forms of heat, especially when the weather has been comparatively moderate. As for the sound issue, I've discovered that just wearing earplugs does the job. I'm not sure I can sleep without them at this point, and that's okay, because when we're sleeping we're not actually, like, talking. She was in my dreams. Which was odd, because she was also right there next to me, but it was also the kindest my brain's been to me in a long time. We awoke around nine, determined that we had some time to kill before she had to get to work, and we killed it in the way that we've been getting so good at. Showered, dressed, to the Sea Biscuit for coffee and food, then I drove her to her office. Kissed and said goodbye, at least for a few days. In the meantime, my mission to is write the book proposal. Part of it is comparing the manuscript to books which have addressed similar topics and themes, showing how they're similar and (more importantly) how they're different, and how that difference will translate into book sales. No pressure! To aid in this, I swung by the Mission Bay Library and checked out as many of the memoirs I've read in the past year and a half as they had in at the moment. I don't need to re-read them—and I read the majority of them at the gym in the first place—but having them handy will help immensely. | ||
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